


hand covers bruise

by freloux



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dominance, F/M, Submission, Vulnerability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 19:12:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11766498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freloux/pseuds/freloux
Summary: Boundaries breaking, all this new.





	hand covers bruise

After an adventure, after a success (and especially after a spectacular failure), Clara’s instinct is always to reach for him. To hold him tight and feel his heartbeats against hers.

As difficult as it is, she comes to accept his instinct to back away. She stops searching for an explanation of why, and this brings an odd sort of relief. Clara lets herself be bound by it, to stop seeking it, to let him be in control.

Her desire belongs to him.

She never thought of herself as something to be caught and tamed. She’s always been independent, and fiercely so: her job, Danny, the strict schedule and regularity of Wednesdays. 

And yet - this is a kind of independence, too. It is her choice to allow him to bring her into a realm full of things she never admitted she wanted, least of all to herself. How they’d both reached for the lever at the same time. _Shut up and show me some planets._

***

She was in mourning for a long time after Danny. After Danny passed -

Did not pass, she reminds herself internally. Was killed. Was taken from her. “Passed” is what people say in front of their Nan, or to the mums at school who shepherd their children out quickly, awkward and unsure in the way that people are when they’re unaccustomed to being confronted with pain. Sorry for your loss. My condolences.

Danny was ripped from her life before she’d learned to give him more room there.

Grief would hit her, settling heavy and uncomfortable in the center of her chest. She’d struggle to breathe, gasping for air in the middle of class and pretending that everything was fine even though it was very clearly not. 

The most random little things would set her off and send her spiralling: the soft feel of cashmere, warm as the memory of a hug; the scent of cologne, caught randomly on her way to Boots or Primark; a song coming on the radio. Snippets of conversation, particular words. They’d call up moments she’d so precisely boxed off and quarantined in her mind.

Being with the Doctor allows her to let go. She feels safe with him.

Call it a hobby, maybe. That’s how she explains it, if people ask. She goes travelling on the odd Wednesday - oh, just daytrips, with a friend of mine, please pass the salt. She’s never been one for small talk, not really. She’d cut herself off, after Danny, and even when he’d been alive there’d been dates to go on, essays to grade, and the Doctor, as roughly and unsuccessfully compartmentalised as he’d been. Social life was not the biggest of priorities.

The essays are still there, of course, but. Her best and truest friend really is, really has become, the Doctor. It’s not a normal hobby, but then again, she’s never been normal, has she?

There is a way he wants these Wednesdays to be, wants her to be. And his generosity is blindly, confusingly, overwhelming. He seems to understand, in his own way, that she needs this, is asking for it from him. But the Doctor speaks in things, not in words. It is easier for him to give her a room on the TARDIS. (It’s nondescript, really, but it’s - there is so much in that gesture alone that she wouldn’t even know where to start to thank him.) Easier for him to plan which galaxies they’re going to visit, easier to let him lead while she follows.

Easier than for him to say -

***

The Frick Collection in New York City is not an intuitive choice for the Doctor, or at least according to what Clara knows of the Doctor. He complains about cities, about getting lost, and worries that she’s blending in too much, that she’s left herself behind to become whatever the adventure requires. He needn’t worry - Clara knows that, but isn’t sure he does. For her, it is going native that’s the escape even more than arriving at the destination itself.

She’s never been to the museum before, and he’s excited about this. He always seems excited, really, about showing her something new. And in truth, there’s no better way to see these works of art than with someone who has lived through it all, who knows half the artists personally and has heard rumours about the rest. The hallways are wide and welcoming, crammed full of ceramics and statues and paintings and and and. She catches his eye and smiles. To her surprise, he actually smiles back before returning to his default serious expression. The two of them, in the evening light, wandering through statuary, all those epics and heroes frozen here. Clara tries not to think about how permanent that is compared to what she’s experienced about time - space - themselves - the past, the present, the future tangled together. That a time loop could just happen and they wouldn’t (he wouldn’t) be able to prevent it, to go back and change it even if he wanted to.

The Frick has no cafe, but there are hundreds of bodegas and restaurants in the city so it’s only a matter of time before they find a tiny out-of-the-way place that, of course, boasts that it has the best pizza in New York. The Doctor buys them both Coca-Cola because this place sells them in the old-fashioned glass bottles and he finds that charming. He’s reaching into his pocket for spare change, or probably a sonic thing that will become spare change, when some stardust she doesn’t recognise escapes from a fold in his coat and spirals down to the floor. Clara’s the only one who notices, but it makes her sad in some undefined way. He goes places without her.

***

The Doctor returns Clara to her flat none the worse for wear. ‘Do you want to come in?’ Clara asks, then immediately regrets it. This wasn’t a date, and yet. Robbing banks isn’t. Going on trains together isn’t. Walking through a museum isn’t.

This isn’t, either. She’s okay with that. But simple details like sharing a Coke, instead of gallivanting to who-knows-where, could make her almost believe that it was. Clara just wants him, his nearness. The way he stumbles, just a little, as he crosses the threshold of the TARDIS into her flat. (It’s the human mechanics of selling the place that have made her keep it.)

So. What to serve her Doctor? Ancient crisps, equally ancient wine, none of the above more like. Clara just wants him, his nearness. Planets revolving, her movement slow, wondering just how much nearness he will give. She’s holding a bottle of wine and he’s standing on the opposite end of the kitchen and none of this is right. Too human, too real.

‘Did you - ‘ She lifts the bottle.

‘No,’ the Doctor says. Voice soft, letting out a tether, drawing her in. Crossing the kitchen might as well be traversing a galaxy. Six feet tall, all of his height over hers. She’s got on her trainers, still, jeans and a shirt and one of those jackets that has a thermal lining, but somehow the outfit feels like one of the sexiest things she’s ever worn.

He touches her hair and his hand is warm, comforting, but when she leans up to kiss him, he pulls away. Instead, there’s this. Stroking her hair, taking the bottle from her and setting it on the counter behind them. Clara waits. Her fingers are sticky-seeming from the bottle. She heels off her trainers. Shorter now. Jacket. Progression. It’s darker out now; they carried the fading daylight with them from the city. The light bulb overhead is dim. She really should change it, shouldn’t she. Human mechanics. Shirt. Excuses.

He’s still touching her hair, strokes languid, lifting it away from her neck then letting it swing back smoothly. It tickles her shoulders: she’s only wearing a bra, now. Boundaries breaking, all this new. She puts her hands to her breasts, her nipples, feather-soft but dragging sticky. Her breath catches.

‘You’re staring,’ she says, trying to make her tone as neutral as possible even though this physical proximity makes her a little light-headed. Jeans, underwear sliding awkward to her knees. Slow drip that clings to her inner thigh. He touches it, catching it on his fingers, then drags it back up to its source. Coca-Cola bottles, thick with condensation. Stardust.

Teasing, but it lands wrong. He lifts an eyebrow and she blushes. ‘I thought - ’

The Doctor looks down at his hands. Hands on the frets, hands on the TARDIS controls. Holding, catching, but here, now, empty.

‘I don’t want you to come,’ he says finally, emotion hidden somewhere in the dark thicket of his accent. ‘Not yet.’

***

His hands over hers. Pressing into the telepathic circuits, the material yielding ever so slightly. It is damp from her touch, from the sweat that prickles along her skin. He instructs her how and when to touch, what lever to stroke, what buttons to push. Their faces are reflected in the pale neon of the engine itself.

The Doctor watches her take a shaky breath and sink her hands into the soft circuits. Pushing, exploring. Her little exclamation of surprise and delight when the engine comes to life and the TARDIS hums at her.

It’s still his space, still on his terms, but she’s starting to grow into it.

She steers them to a smallish planet and they land on a slightly hilly landscape that’s covered in lavender flowers made of clay. A bright sky shines above them. Not TARDIS blue, but somewhere in between indigo and a light, pearly colour. It’s illumined by an invisible sun.

They walk out of the TARDIS and explore the hills, walking some centimeters apart and kicking up small dusts of clay as they go. He’s still not a hugger. She’s not sure if she’s allowed to take his hand, either. Her desire lives within her, dormant but only just. Flickering, waiting.

She lets it reach out to him. Explaining. Somewhere in her mind she feels him consent.

He still does not take her hand and does not say anything aloud. Instead the images, the instructions, flood her mind and she nearly gasps with the force of it. Clara settles onto the ground next to him. They’re very nearly touching. It’s always nearly, isn’t it. The almosts, the what-ifs, the maybes. She can live on this. It is a language she knows, it is the one that they speak to each other.

She lets him take off her shoes and his hands cradle first one heel, then the other. His long, slim fingers brush against her ankle bone and she shivers. Somewhere she can hear the TARDIS humming again. Clara wonders if this is just something he has within him always: the opportunity to escape, the desire to run.

Her tights and skirt do not come off as easily. There is tugging and pulling involved. Clara wants to laugh, but doesn’t.

Clara can’t breathe with how much she wants this, wants him. She’s got most of her clothes on, still. Her sweater, her blouse, smooth silky fabric that clings to her breasts. This is how he wants it, though. Not all of them touching, not completely. This incremental thing.

The Doctor, forcing her to push her fingers deeper into herself. His breathing. Her breathing. Heartbeat. Heartbeat. She doesn’t look at him, and he doesn’t look at her. Instead, Clara watches the sky. It seems to be daytime here on this planet, but it’s fast edging into night. Prussian blue, blooming out above them.

She strokes herself, insistent, her fingers tracing over her clit in uneven circles. Panting, whimpering, twisting on her own hand, imagining that it’s his. And for the briefest of moments, it is - the Doctor takes hold of her wrist and draws it away from herself to set it on her thigh. Her body tingles and buzzes and _pulses_ , desire amplified all the more from the restraint. The pattern faltering until it leads into a slow fade.

***

It is after an adventure, as most of their life is these days. Everything lived in the afters and the befores, always waiting for the next grand exploit, running as far and as fast as they can. ‘I want,’ he says, ‘to give you something.’ ( _And anything you want, I want,_ Clara doesn't say. Their symbiosis.)

He's got a small box, neatly wrapped in white paper and tied off with a golden bow that shimmers in the console lights. But not yet. There are things to be done first. He leads her to the bath and gently (so gently it almost makes her cry) takes her clothes off and helps her into the tub that's been built into the wall. There’s a silver removable shower head and he guides it, suspending the water over her her head, her breasts, between her legs, her entire body. It’s all smooth motions - smoother than she's ever seen him, or that anyone that gangly has any right to be.

There's something quiet, even holy, about this. He's washing her clean.

Afterwards he towells her off and leads her, naked, to her bedroom. Clara feels a little sleepy - lulled into this, cared for. They sit side by side on her little white bed, with a towel and pillow arranged on it just so, and a washcloth waiting on the white nightstand nearby. Anticipation in all these blank surfaces. The Doctor shows her the box again and this time offers it to her to unwrap. Inside, nestled on a foamy cushion, is a navy-dark plug suffused with a dark, shimmery material that looks like far-away stars.

He guides her onto her stomach and holds onto her hips to lift her onto the pillow, getting her elevated. He palms her arse - not hard enough to sting, more of a signal, a preparation, than anything else. To open her up and reveal that tight little muscle. The Doctor draws the fingers of his right hand over it. Light, exploratory. She squirms until he palms her arse again. More firmly this time; now it is a warning. Clara's certain she's leaking onto the pillow now. Her thighs are starting to feel sticky. She pushes her elbows into the mattress, lifting herself that much higher towards his touch.

The little click of the lubricant bottle opening is such a tiny sound that it nearly underscores the significance of this. Of him touching her with lubricant-slick fingers, pressing against and then inside -

His fingers are crooked a little and he moves them slowly, repetitively. Clara's soothed by the rhythm, so much so that she gives a little sigh of loss when he withdraws his fingers. A pause, then she feels the hard, smooth tip of the plug pushing deep inside her. Clara gasps, breathless crooning that follows the steady journey of the plug. Deep, deeper still, until she full-on moans as her muscles close around it to keep the plug in place.

Clara pants desperately, shifting against the pillow. She's so full now. It's an adjustment that doesn't seem to stop: she can feel the movement of the plug deep inside her, even as she sits up slowly. The Doctor gently takes her hand and guides her off the bed. He takes the washcloth from the side of the bed - Clara shivers when she sees the bottle of lubricant next to it - and wipes off her inner thighs.

In some far-off corner of her mind, Clara remembers that she has to go to school now, to teach, and this makes her more alert, taking her out of this moment. It’s strange how time always feels like a suspended thing with the Doctor, like nothing else matters.

He's gentle, almost unbearably so, as he helps her get dressed. It feels strange: this man, this alien, who was once so afraid of touch is now buttoning her cardigan, straightening her skirt, showing her the stars and how and what to be. Maybe it’s because this is touch he can control, the kind of touch that he wants and is able to give. Something he can understand and initiate without it being unexpected and random.

‘And keep it inside yourself until - ‘ and here he becomes hesitant, unsure. ‘ - until you return here tonight. It's Wednesday, after all. We have places to go to. Planets to save.’

He smiles, then - quick, brisk, a reflection of the Doctor she had to re-learn not so long ago - and opens the TARDIS doors for her. He's as startled at this as she is, it seems to Clara, as she steps out onto the village green across from Coal Hill and the TARDIS dematerialises behind her. The certainty of this, that Wednesdays belong to them.

She thinks about this all day at school. How can she not? The reminder is there inside her, shifting every time she moves, sits, or stands. The idea that the universe (his universe) can be a part of her if she lets it.

***

There is something different in his touch when he removes the plug that night. He’s no less gentle than before, yet this time - he lingers, and that makes her shiver as much as the feel of the plug sliding back out of her. She doesn't want him to touch her there, to feel him deep, though he certainly could: she's open, now, and sticky with lubricant. What she wants is to touch him.

And touch herself, if she's honest. It is a strange thing to have her orgasm so tied to this loose-limbed man, who even now is awkward as he puts the plug away in its box with the lube, as if ashamed at being so open with her about his desires.

She wants to come. She wants him to let her come. If he doesn’t, and she does when she’s not allowed, well - that’s a risk she’s willing to take. So Clara sits up and starts touching herself, almost curious and shy. The wet, sticky noise of pushing her own fingers inside herself makes him turn from the nightstand.

Clara maintains eye contact with him as she presses the heel of her left hand against her mons pubis, giving her fingers better leverage to rub easily on her clit, made swollen and prominent between layers of skin. She lifts her right hand to her breasts - holding, cupping. The Doctor watches her carefully, not entirely expressionless but more evaluative: this is who she is and what she wants.

It all explodes in vivid technicolour then, remembering - her nipples, hard, rubbing against the mattress while she’d braced herself back - his hands - her arse - 

Clara knows he’s psychic and doesn’t care. She tells him how this made her feel. Saying this aloud makes it more real: she chose this, she’s not his to take.

He sits next to her and tilts her face towards him. Clara sighs, breath uneven, as she continues to touch herself - leaning a little, shaking while he holds her. They’re so close to each other, yet still in that far-off and weird in-between place. It is then that he kisses her. Eyes wide open, soul meeting soul. She wants so much touch: low, where she’s throbbing (waiting), and up where their bodies still don’t quite meet like he’s holding her heart in his hands.

Clara gasps, unsteady, and sets her other hand onto his shoulder, smoothing her fingers down over her clit again. The Doctor is careful and holds her loosely. Not a hug, because hugs are just a way of hiding your face. It’s as if he believes that Clara is going to break apart in his arms. But she’s careful, too - she’s learned that he’s more delicate than he appears.

She doesn’t push, doesn’t force, just kisses him gently with a mere press of her lips on his. He kisses back, warm, and cautiously slides his tongue to meet hers in her mouth. Her lips drag wetly, aimless patterns, meandering. Press and release. Clara sighs, wanting to remain here for as long as she can.

He pauses and pulls away from her. She reaches for him and he moves as if to speak but ultimately doesn’t. Something lingering there, at once familiar and new. It’s gone almost as soon as she recognises it.

***

There is still much she doesn’t know about the Doctor, so Clara latches onto tiny details like she’s slotting together parts of a Rubik’s Cube. Maybe if she collects all the information she can then the colours will line up and she’ll be able to understand this man that she’s chosen to give herself to. Walking through the TARDIS is like walking through the Doctor’s mind.

She knows that he has some influence on the way things look here. The room he gave her, something conjured up in response to what he thinks of her, of what she might need. It’s full of round things - _I’ve always liked round things_ \- and he’s right, they’re oddly soothing.

There are books, of course, hundreds of thousands of them. In places that are libraries and places that aren’t libraries at all, like the kitchen. (There was an original copy of the _First Folio_ hiding behind the coffee maker and she’d gasped in horror before spiriting it off to the safety of her bedroom.)

It isn’t the books that fascinate her, though, nor is it the machines, all those gears and pulleys and countless whatsits.

What fascinates her is the miscellany that can make up a life. A multicoloured scarf, flung carelessly over a chair. Photos of a very curly-haired woman who smiles up at Clara with a knowing sort of smirk. A small poster version of the Union Jack next to a tube of lipstick and a stethoscope. Scuffed navy blue Converse kicked off into the corner. A bow tie - that one makes her a bit startled at the thought that he was someone else before this, someone she knew.

The piles of things go on and on and on, until Clara begins to feel like she’s in a museum, yet one more personal and lived-in than the Frick. There’s a sense of the unfinished here, a hesitancy. And fear, though she can’t yet place what the Doctor would be afraid of. She’s watched him stand down aliens with little more than a well-placed quip. He even used a spoon as a weapon, once.

It makes her wonder what happens when the resources aren’t at hand, what he looks like when it stops.

***

Clara glances out the window on the way to get herself a cup of coffee, hoping that she won’t find more valuable manuscripts in imminent danger from lurking somewhere in the kitchen. There are a couple of windows on the TARDIS that appear according to either the ship’s mood or the Doctor’s. She knows that there’s one in the ‘real’ library that shows a permanently sunny day. There’s the one her room that filters softer light. (There are probably more somewhere - there’s still so much of the TARDIS that she has yet to explore.)

And then there’s this one, which allows her a glimpse of an ever-changing arc of light. A pale seaweed green that flushes amber then purple then -

‘We’re entering an aurora,’ the Doctor explains, shuffling out of the kitchen with a mug of tea in one hand. ‘There are some things that - that I wanted to get for you.’

Clara looks up at him expectantly, but he doesn’t elaborate further. Instead he stares into his mug of tea, eyebrows drawn down and close together and his temples a faint shade of pink.

***

Entering the aurora is like getting put through a waste compactor. Clara feels an overwhelming compression that seems to continue for a millennia. She looks out the window at the continuing electromagnetic flares. They seem closer now, flickering against the window in random swirls.

Her whole body is being squeezed, held. Her ears pop and there’s an unsettling, suspended feeling in her stomach as though she’s weightless. The TARDIS remains intact around her, although it doesn’t seem to be bigger on the inside anymore: wherever they’re going is forcing the entire TARDIS to shrink herself and her occupants into a more relative size.

After some minutes of claustrophobia, Clara is surrounded by a dizzying array of colourful magnetic rays of light that seep in through the windows and swim on her skin, those patterns of green and purple and amber.

They arrive far less gracefully than Clara was expecting them to, but the Doctor quickly sets all to rights and they’re off, leaving the TARDIS hovering in her own force field.

All of the buildings here are in the aurora colours, as are the aliens that wander past them. They float above Clara and the Doctor as if the aliens are just part of the atmosphere. They very likely are: one moment Clara smiles at an alien with a slightly blurry face who may or may not smile back before melting into another arc of light.

The Doctor walks with a curious sort of purpose, which forces Clara to run after him more than she usually would otherwise. He’s headed for an building with a vaulted glass ceiling. Inside is a glassworks and a loom. One of the aurora-beings has formed itself into a vague sitting-down shape to cast its immaterial hands over strands of some sort of silver-grey fiber. The strands seem to work themselves into rope of their own accord. At the glassworks, colourful hands smelt and push and form. Metal rods, tips glowing orange and amorphous, fire sealing.

There, laid out on the table and cushioned by that mysterious fabric, are the result of the aurora-beings’ work. Clara notices one in particular: it is long, and somewhat thick but not excessively so, with a tip that flares to a small, dulled point like the bulb of a tulip. The shaft is ridged with what look like small waves: tiny glass points of pale pink that fade back into the solid, clear glass of the shaft itself.

The Doctor returns from the loom with a length of rope in his hand. He follows her gaze. ‘This one?’ he asks, gesturing.

‘Yes.’ Clara is more confident in her decisions now. Her orbit shifting. ‘You want to use these with me?’ It’s less a dare or an invitation than an open question, another twist of the Rubik’s Cube.

‘Only if you’ll let me.’

***

Clara holds her wrists aloft as the Doctor binds them together over her head with the rope before setting them back down on the mattress. He checks her pulse, both out of that duty of care and, she’s come to believe, his simultaneous fascination with and apprehension of the human.

Pause. She watches him as he opens the nightstand cupboard again, this time to retrieve a soft and silky purple ribbon. He gently wraps the blindfold over her eyes and the world fades away. It’s ironic, Clara thinks at first. The disappointed urgency with which he’d said _you look at me and you can’t see me_ -

But that’s the thing. It’s not physical sight at all. It’s the sensation of knowing and understanding him. A glimmer of his fear, of his not wanting to start another unfinishable thing.

She lifts her hips onto the pillow and, following the push of his hands on her inner thighs, opens her legs. He guides the phallus into her slowly. It is the bulbous tip she feels first. It’s large and blunt, and she squirms on it, trying to adjust to the stretch, before he forces her still with the impact of a well-placed hand, open and flat, on her upper thigh. She lets him continue, then. Yielding to and resisting the pleasure.

The thick waves on the shaft rub insistently at the quivering muscles inside her. Clara moans. It’s not his cock, and yet she feels closer to him than she ever has. Her senses have narrowed down to pinpoints. The thrusting motion of the phallus as it rocks her back onto the mattress. His heartbeats - in the silence, in the dark of the blindfold, to Clara’s ears they are as loud as the TARDIS engine’s hum in the background as if the two are one and the same. Perhaps they are.

The sound, the feeling, surrounds her, holds her up, carries her through. Clara is wet; the purchase that the phallus had inside her is starting to slip so he moves it that much harder, thrusting it at a deliberate angle that strokes against where her nerves are most raw. She gasps. He’s pulling her nearer to that high, almost sharp, point of pleasure, closer than he’s ever let her be.

Clara can hear her own heartbeat now. It echoes on his until it’s all she can hear, can feel, as her muscles tense up tight then hit a long release. He keeps a hand firmly on her left hip, holding her open while she squirts and moans. She’s coming, so hard it’s nearly painful, clenching firm on the phallus over and over again as he moves it deeper inside her, pushing and forcing more of her come to drip down along its length and soak into the mattress beneath her.

It’s like it doesn’t stop - she doesn’t want it to stop - she’s trying to talk but there are no real words at hand to say. Instead all she’s got are muffled, mumbled sounds caught behind tight-pressed lips as she arches up, whimpering, chasing this.

Chasing him.

She wants to reach out but can’t - her wrists are still bound together, and the tension of being caught and held back seems to make her come even harder. There’s pressure between her legs, concentrated around the deep thrusts of the phallus as he guides it into her again and again until she can’t take it anymore. She’s all raw and wet, and groans when she squirts again, leaking onto the phallus, her thighs, the bed.

The comedown is intense in itself and takes place slowly, like the return to Earth after a long journey through the stars. She rides out the last few shockwaves as she readjusts to her own atmosphere, settling back into her body and panting with the force of it all.

He gradually withdraws the phallus with a careful hand, conscious of the way her inner muscles are still spasming. She feels empty, now, left to the fading remains of her orgasm as she lies back on the mattress, breathing hard and twisting a little at the remaining oversensitivity.

It’s not a jarring change when he takes off the blindfold: her room is gentle, inviting, so she has time to adjust, blinking at the return to light. The only change she notices is when she looks up at him as he unties her wrists and massages the skin to encourage her circulation. He allowed her release for the first time, and it appears he let go of something, too.

He scrunches up his face, clears his throat, and sets about her aftercare. Blankets, a hot meal, getting her cosy and warm. She’s snuggled up in bed, wearing pyjamas and finishing the last of the cocoa when she realises that he’s still holding the rope, twisting it absently in his hands.

Somehow she’s not surprised when he runs, though she still wishes he would stay.

***

The coloured blocks of the Rubik’s Cube arranging themselves.

She’d sat next to him on the steps and listened patiently while he wondered aloud about his morality. She’d reached for his hand, once, in the Nethersphere. Expecting and not expecting him to reach back - that language of gesture, of things left unsaid or lost in translation. She’d heard the catch in his voice when he’d requested to just talk about planets instead of the deeper questions of hatred and love.

He sits in the console room, on those same steps. Clara settles herself next to him so that she’s facing his knit-together, furrowed face - his features are too softened by fear and concern for him to look like an angry owl - and his hands, which are still holding the rope.

‘Doctor,’ she says, quiet and gentle. He turns to look at her now - _the first face this face saw_ \- and she’s struck by his watery half-smile.

Clara takes his head in her hands. Cradling. The Doctor winces but does not extricate himself from her touch. Drops the smile he’s pretending to have and hands her the rope. Surrendering now. She remembers: down on his knees begging, can't live without her - _please, don't even argue_.

Maybe he needs this, too.

***

They stand together in the middle of her little room on the TARDIS, her window filtering in milky-grey light. He’s a full foot taller than her, but it doesn’t make much of a difference. This is Clara’s space now, on her terms - her awareness of and relationship to the Doctor - and this seems to give her height.

She sets the rope on the bed and turns to face him once more, searching his face. The Doctor has gone on about her “unreadable facial things,” and yet Clara is beginning to think that she needs some flash cards of her own.

His hands are out fluttering, conducting, hovering now here at his waist, now there, tracing over the buttons on his jacket. Clara reaches out to catch them, hold them in her own for a moment, before giving his hands a squeeze and gently guiding them to stand still at the sides of his body. This body he’s given and re-given himself so many times, and now he’s giving it to her.

Up to his jacket, feeling the smooth velvet lining, then slipping it off his shoulders to reveal the soft interior underneath the hardened shell. His hair, tufted silver and grey, more curly and wild than when she first met him. His hoodie, navy cotton all cosy beneath her searching fingertips. Jeans, rough denim. Thick-soled Docs, a firm foundation that comes away with the whisk-snick of laces undone. She bends and kneels and moves around him, removing all his layers while he remains perfectly still.

Clara gets ahold of the rope again and he moves instinctively towards her, until he remembers himself and goes still again.

Something settles warm and heavy in the pit of her stomach. She wants him. She wants to be wanted by him. And it’s there, she has it: his desire is revealed in the way he looks up at her. The tendons in his neck jumping, erratic.

She pushes him back onto the bed and he sits obligingly. He’s quiet and watches her carefully. Clara returns his gaze, but only for a moment - too vulnerable, it hurts.

Instead she focuses on the knots. Hands joined behind his back, supporting him so she can loop the rope upwards to his neck. Clara connects the ties together before leading it down over his chest in a latticework that reaches his upper thighs to frame his cock. The Doctor sits now with his thighs slightly spread, and that’s when she sees him for real. His cock curves up from the triangle of rope she’s created around it, nestled in dark, thick hair.

A sheath of skin covers him, clinging to his cock wet and protective. It’s like no one’s ever touched him there at all. She reaches for him, pulling the skin back slowly, and he hisses with sensitivity. All exposed now, the head of his cock revealed thick and blushing pink. He swallows hard.

Breathing, shuddering. She won’t let him go, not yet. Caught there. Hers to take, hers to own. Clara holds him and feels her orbit shift again as he jerks and twitches in her hand. One gentle motion and he’s covered again, skin moving in a slick, slow drag along his shaft.

He whines - his cock is leaking, dripping, _aching_ and she can feel it as she slides the skin once more, letting his slit pulse openly over her fingers. His face, mouth open and eyebrows furrowed as he gasps and tries to thrust up into her hand, seeking more friction, before she pushes him back down again. He’s panting now, whimpering, moaning her name as she lets go. He sighs at the denial of pleasure, at the way she’s forced his cock to sway stiffly before relaxing back into softness. Clara leaves him there for some moments, considering.

She doesn’t touch him there yet, but kisses him instead: leaning down for once, deliberately keeping her hands on his shoulders instead of his shuddering, wet cock. They kiss slowly, and he doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. Lets her kiss him, deep and confident. He moans a little when she rubs her lips on his, coaxing his mouth open for their tongues to meet.

And he gasps - this tiny, wonderful sigh - when she takes his cock in her hand again. She strokes upwards and sees something adjust in his face. Saw it, named it, knows it now.


End file.
